MARIANNA — A spot of buried blood. A drop of subsurface semen. A bone fragment in the ground for decades.

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Those are things cadaver dogs have been trained to smell, according to handlers from NecroSearch International, a nonprofit group enlisted to help find the bodies of boys who died in custody of the state’s oldest reform school here on the outskirts of town.

The search continues this week for boys buried outside the known cemetery on the campus of the now-shuttered Dozier School for Boys, known through the years as the Florida Industrial School and the Florida School for Boys.

A shirt button, a plaque saying “at rest” and a stone marble found in what’s believed to have been the coffin of a 6-year-old boy are just some of the almost ten thousand artifacts USF researchers have removed from 55 graves at the former Dozier School for Boys in Marianna, Fla.

Those items – along with hundreds of coffin nails also recovered there – might help investigators identify the bodies buried in the school’s mysterious Boot Hill cemetery and elsewhere on the site.

“One of the ways that we can do that through the style of the nail and the nail head and the style of other artifacts is to identify where they were made and the range of dates in which those particular items were produced,” said Christian Wells, USF associate producer of anthropology. “That can help us narrow down this list of 55 individuals into much smaller and